The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has refused Democratic requests to investigate possible conflicts of interest involving President Donald Trump, is seeking criminal charges against a former State Department employee who helped set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday asking him to convene a grand jury or charge Bryan Pagliano, the computer specialist who helped establish Clinton’s server while she was secretary of state.

To paraphrase Justice Harlan, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel is the governing credo of House Republicans. I mean, the camel might have a bad weave job but it contains upper-class tax cuts.

Post navigation

I still make chaffetz the frontrunner in the coveted house member you most want to punch in the nose award sweepstakes.

efgoldman

So
many
candidates
though.

DrDick

All of them. Every last one. Chaffetz and Ryan both deserve a shot to the ‘nads.

ExpatChad

They have ‘nads???

kped

Honestly, for me Paul Ryan (aka, the Zombie Eyed Granny Starver) is so far ahead in that race that Chaffetz just can’t catch up. Ryan combines being a hack with the fake earnest hang dog expression that makes me want to drive my fist right through his face each time I see him.

Donalbain

Rand Paul. All day and all night. If Rand Paul was the diamond thing that the Doctor had to punch through to get to the TARDIS in Heaven Sent, I would say that he would have just started to get a fraction of the face punches he deserves.

efgoldman

We could make a shorter, more coherent list of the RWNJs who aren’t punchable.
There must be at least a half dozen of them.
Maybe.

(((Malaclypse)))

Rand isn’t in the House

kped

Pfff, Rand Paul needs to be a lot more of a phony (he’s a big one…) to get to Paul Ryan’s level. Paul at least just outright says he wants to gut health care. Ryan pretends it’s helping people, and darn it, look at that hang dog expression, he really cares about the poor! He just feels that them eating is less important than upper class tax cuts…

Linnaeus

It’s that culture of dependency on food.

brewmn

Not that I’m eager to rush in to defend Paul Ryan, but at least he’s not targeting an innocent individual for criminal prosecution for the purely political purpose of diverting attention away from the incompetence and insanity of his party’s leader.

It makes their souls empty, and he’s just looking out for their souls.

daves09

Missing the whole point on this.
Sessions convenes grand jury which under his careful guidance morphs into a complete rehash of the hearings. Everyone, including the Hilzbeast herself, is subpoenaed, the jury of course leaks like a sieve-but these are the good leaks-and the MSM gets to do another orgy of Trump is crazy but what about these emails. And of course Chaffetz can very piously claim that this isn’t political. it’s the Justice Dept. for dog’s sake.
Will they fall for it-I don’t know.

brewmn

That’s my thinking as well. Hell, the NY Times is probably already getting Trump fatigue, what with all the legitimate scandals, obvious incompetence, and so on.

I’m sure the clever plan is to get him to cut a deal – tell them whatever they want to hear about Hitlery’s EVIL MACHINATIONS and he’ll go free.

Also – EMAILS to distract the press from whatever the Cheeto-in-Chief is doing.

BiloSagdiyev

Yes, I was wondering this week, they’re going to have to cook up one heckuva phoneybaloney distraction to get the media away from their newfound hobby of truth-telling. I was assuming it would be some small war.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s office will not comply with a subpoena received Thursday from a congressional committee seeking documents in connection with her office’s investigation into Exxon Mobil Corp., Healey’s office said.

The records are being pursued by Congressman Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which also previously issued Healey a subpoena in June.

Healey’s office on Thursday evening reiterated that it does not intend to comply and maintained that the House committee has no jurisdiction over the state investigations into the oil company that began last spring.

In April Healey along with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened a fraud investigation into Exxon about whether the company encouraged climate-change confusion for years after its own scientists established the risks.

Snarki, child of Loki

“…and we’re also not turning over the records on the Lamar Smith goatfucking investigation” Healy should have added.

(((Malaclypse)))

Healy is genuinely great.

BiloSagdiyev

Egads. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess because I’m not wicked enough.

An investigation into the global climate change hoax will justify itself for years, as they search and search but OMG how deep does it go?! How did these evil, plotting, rootless academics (dogwhistle) hide the proof of their nefarious scheme so well? Still no proof of what we know they did! WE NEED MORE SUBPEONAS! More kangaroo court hearings!

BigHank53

“We just need to waterboard a few of these eggheads…”

Don’t forget that torture really does work. Not for intelligence gathering, of course. But if you’re interested in false confessions and suppressing internal dissent…there’s a good reason it’s front and center in the authoritarian toolbox.

CP

I don’t see why they’re messing around with a pawn when they can go after the queen.

The same reason they went after Susan Rice for Benghazi, whose grand crime in the whole story was repeating the talking points that had been put in front of her by Petraeus. When you can’t go after someone because they’re too highly placed, you take it out on their subordinates. Basic rules of Official Washington.

njorl

Hilary has the resources to defend herself from a pointless persecution. This guy might not. Faced with several years of expensive, baseless, legal harassment, he might choose to admit to some crime he didn’t commit. Then they have “evidence” of the “crime” Hilary is getting away with.

efgoldman

How quickly do you suppose gofundme can raise a defense fund?
They easily raised more than enough theoretically to buy back Toomey’s vote on DeVos. Didn’t work, but still…

LosGatosCA

Their goal is to exceed the combined record of the Iraq War and Katrina rebuilding oversight committees.

This isn’t new, as Christopher Buckley said it’s not corruption, it’s just their way of saying ‘we’re open for business!’

alexceres

“Meat’s back on the menu boys!”

Rob in CT

If only the Rohirrim were coming.

rea

With Elizabeth Warren pointing out to the Witch King of Orangeness that she is no man?

Rob in CT

We still need a hobbit with a magic sword to fatally weaken the Witch King’s enchantment so that our Eowyn (Gillibrand looks more like her and is more likely to be the 2020 candidate, so let’s roll w/her) can deliver the final blow. A relative nobody. Small, weak, frightened, and overlooked in all the chaos of battle.

Meriadoc Brandybuck, America needs you.

This is pretty bad fanfic, innnit?

Hogan

Yglesias once pointed out that Dennis Kucinich can afford to take extreme positions because, as a hobbit married to an elf, he can always leave for the Western Lands if things go bad. He never seems especially frightened, though.

wjts

This is pretty bad fanfic, innnit?

Sure, but I think you’re being a little hard on yourself: it’s the best anyone could do given the source material you have to work with.

rhino

Trump is no witch king. Cheney, now Cheney would have made a ring wraith in his day.

Rob in CT

I had that thought too… it all falls down because these people are such clowns. The only Trumper who even remotely works as an agent of The Enemy from LOTR is Bannon.

El Guapo

I dunno, Stephen Miller makes a pretty good Mouth of Sauron. And he was dismissed pretty summarily by Aragorn IIRC.

Hogan

We appear to be in the Harvard Lampoon version, fighting Sorhed and Serutan.

rhino

‘Hairy toes’, purred the elf maiden, ‘I love hairy toes!’

I lost track of my copy decades ago. I loved that book like some men love their children.

I’m glad the first comment on the WaPo article is expressing indignation at calling the email server a “home-brew server” which is so obviously meant to be derogatory it beggars belief WaPo would use it makes it practically mandatory.

cpinva

I expect Chaffetz is counting down the days until the 2018 elections, at which point even Utah voters may have finally had enough of his donothingness in congress. yes, would someone, anyone, please punch him in the face?

H.R.1096 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
To amend title 31, United States Code, to provide for transparency of payments made from the Judgment Fund.

2. H.R.1062 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
To amend title 18, United States Code, to specify the circumstances in which a person may acquire geolocation information and for other purposes.

H.R.1061 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
To amend title 18, United States Code, to regulate the use of cell-site simulators, and for other purposes.

H.R.1033 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
To amend titles 5 and 28, United States Code, to require the maintenance of databases on, awards of fees and other expenses to prevailing parties in certain administrative proceedings and court cases to which the United States is a party, and for other purposes.

When checks and balances are truly required, they will not exist. Logically, by that time the rot will have spread so much that no effective check or balance can exist.

Brett

Chaffetz, man. I fucking hate that I live in this asshole’s district. There’s not much hope of getting his ass out the door in 2018, either, because the Utah Republican Party has dominated the state forever and they gerry-mander it up every time there’s a census. Chaffetz is in a super-safe district (there was a 47% absolute percentage margin between him and the Democrat), so the only way he’s going out the door is if he commits some conservative “heresy” and gets replaced by someone even more fanatically conservative and Trumpist – and he knows that for certain.

Such a nice set of national representatives we have. Ted Cruz’s little Tea Party buddy Mike Lee, Orrin “I say I’ll retire but never will*” Hatch, fucking Chaffetz, Mia Love, Rob “Let’s Privatize Federal Lands!” Bishop, and the non-entity that is Chris Stewart (he’s basically Rob Bishop lite, but with one non-shitty thing he did with regards to Zika).

* Maybe that’s for the best, though. I think the only reason Hatch wasn’t Tea Partied out of office like Bob Bennett was because people realized that might make it easier for Congress to shut down Hill Air Force Base.

kped

Not a real point…but that’s not actually gerrymandered. When a party gerrymanders a state, they take a seat like Chaffetz won by 47%, and start breaking it up to help other more vulnerable party members. In the end, they are happier with a safe 55%-45% victory, or even a little smaller if they can spread out some of that love.

(or, alternatively, it’s when they draw a ridiculous map to herd all of a states black people into one district covering the entire state so that they can blunt the force of the black vote….)

NeonTrotsky

Honestly Utah is probably republican enough that you could probably gerrymander districts with a much larger margin for their representatives across the state if that makes sense.

Taylor

Can someone reconcile this Gestapo thug with someone who worked for Dukakis?

The concentration camp kommandant who doesn’t hate Jews, it’s just a good career move?

Up until today the biggest shit-stain on Earth

Holy fuck what a shit stain.

In for a penny, in for a pound. Eh, el Chaffy?

LeeEsq

Weasels have more integrity than Chaffetz.

BigHank53

All the members of the weasel family are also better looking, more trustworthy, and considerably more useful.

ExpatChad

And ferrets smell better !!1

Nathan Goldwag

The only thing that will convince me of the existence of just and loving God after the last year is if Chaffetz is found having sex with a male prostitute in a Capitol bathroom, at which point it is discovered that the prostitute is a Russian spy who’s been exploiting the flaws in Chaffetz’s private email server to steal vital American information, at which point he is expelled from Congress, excommunicated from the Mormon Church, and imprisoned for a lengthy sentence. Amen.

LeeEsq

The Russians did this sort of thing during the Cold War. I don’t see why they wouldn’t do the same thing now. Anna Chapman was a Russian honey trap but an incompetent one.

Snarki, child of Loki

…OR, he could just move to Louisiana and see if he could get in on some of that Vitter “coat-tails” action.

Timurid

They make diapers with coat tails?

Nathan Goldwag

That works too! I just want him humiliated and his career destroyed.

JKTH

If it truly is always projection, we just need to sit back and wait.

LeeEsq

According to my Facebook feed, Republican congresspeople are refusing to do town halls because they don’t want to face angry voters. I guess loyalty is a political virtue that is underrated these days but it has limits. Nearly every American with a little bit of good sense is deeply worried and the Republicans need to do their job. Not that I’m expected them to.

Gregor Sansa

To be fair: the angry voters in this case are the Democrats, who have found a strong voice even in red districts.

kped

Let’s hope their voice translates to votes in 2018…

Linnaeus

Let’s hope that state Democratic parties are paying attention.

yet_another_lawyer

To be honest, I don’t really get why politicians of any stripe do town halls, and I wondered much the same about Democrats during the run-up to the ACA being passed. The best case scenario is that you make a small positive impression with a tiny handful of voters. The worst case scenario is that things go wrong, your fuck-up becomes viral, and it haunts you for the rest of your political career. With each congressional district covering ~700,000 people and each Senator representing an entire state, the numbers just don’t work out. Much, much easier/better to have an “interview” with a friendly “journalist.”

Cheerfull

It’s a problem of a democracy of 300 million people. All the usual, traditional levers of contacting your representative depend on not too many people attempting it. Congressional phone lines are jammed, and the implication they pay fairly little attention to emails. If 1% of the population consistently attempted to call or attend town halls the logistics get difficult fast.

I admire Indivisible for trying to hack the democracy (using hack in a positive sense) but it looks like if you try to turn the handle too often it breaks off in your hand.

Bitter Scribe

Agreed. It’s just hanging your chin out. Those town halls are nothing but an excuse for soreheads to vent.

efgoldman

I don’t really get why politicians of any stripe do town halls

Before Dick Armey astroturfed the TeaHadis in 2010, town halls were routine, quiet affairs, mostly for meet and greet and constituent services. A few dozen people, mostly in Hoverrounds, would show up to have a cup of coffee and shake hands with the congresscritter. Tell him what a fine job he was doing, maybe ask about an issue (my social security check is screwed up, and I can’t get anyone on the phone). Moatly harmless. Many members didn’t even have town meetings, just had office hours in their district for the same purpose.

Gregor Sansa

Erik’s post on the building trades got a wingnut pingback, and then disappeared.

I would understand a desire not to fight a troll avalanche, if that’s what’s going on. But I wonder what the plan is to not let that silence us. I’m confident Erik is not cowering in fear, but I look forward to seeing the post return in some form.

To entertain this nonsense for half a second, what could the guy possibly be indicted for? He set up an e-mail server at the behest of his boss? So the fuck what? How about we indict Hillary Clinton’s maid too, because e-mails!

liberal

The Federal government does have some laws about records preservation, IT, etc, and it wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever that there’s an actual law that was broken.

Look, this is idiotic, and the EMAILZ thing during the campaign was idiotic, but having her own email server was a stupid thing to do. Yes, the treatment HRC received from the media wasn’t fair or reasonable, but so what? We’re basically in a war, and when you’re in a war, you don’t want your higher ups doing stupid fucking things. This was a stupid fucking thing. What was the upside? Oh, yeah, people here often seem to buy the bullshit that Federal IT is fundamentally broken. Like I say, that’s bullshit; I worked as both a Federal employee and a contractor-who-wasn’t-a-federal-employee-but-in-all-important-respects-worked-like-one, and there was nothing wrong with the email system.

Yeah, I know, I know, the Republicans are horrible, horrible shitstains.. True. But that’s only one of the issues. If an Allied commander made dumb tactical mistakes during the fight against Nazi Germany, would we defend him by saying “no, it’s OK, because the Nazis are genocidal maniacs”? No, we’d cashier him.

jim, some guy in iowa

if we’re in a war another thing we don’t do is say, “you know, the Nazis have a point here and we should just roll over”

rhino

Yeah, I have to agree. There should never have been such a fuss, in anything like a reasonable world. But we have all known this isn’t a reasonable world any more, if it ever was.

There is, of course, the problem that it is impossible to never misstep. Missteps are going to happen, and then you’re in the hands of the news cycle. Look at what happened to Howard Dean. Or John Kerry. Or even, arguably (and thank god for this one) Mitt Romney. All candidates doing okay until a misstep or a dirty trick that might have gone nowhere blew up.

And there were very few legitimate missteps by the Clinton campaign. The problem was not the campaign, it was that the media bias was enormous, and the bullshit baggage was more powerful than most ever expected. And that the media woke up to reality far too late.

What we have, fundamentally, is a failure of democracy. Sometimes I wonder if, at least in America, repair of the system used to elect the government is even possible anymore. I can tell you one thing, I am glad my Canadian parents took me back across the border right after I popped out a month early. I used to love the time I spent down there, But I haven’t been back for 20 years and now I doubt I ever will again.

Of course, increasingly, I wonder if one day I will wake up to an M1 Abrams parked on my street corner, and some friendly Marines going house to house with a deck of playing cards…

yet_another_lawyer

I agree with all this and two addendums:

1) Her stated rationale was that she… didn’t want to have to use two devices. Taking this at face value, then perhaps it would have been easier to invest in an assistant, pantsuits with bigger pockets, or some other conveyance that would allow her to achieve the Herculean task of using two different mobile phones.
2) She stated it complied with records retention because virtually all of her work email was either to/from somebody with a .gov email address, meaning it was retained on their end. Which means that what she’s doing works if she’s literally the only person who does it, because if two people with homebrew servers emailed each other without CC’ing somebody with a .gov, the record would not be retained. Obviously that’s an unworkable rationale.

The coverage of emails was completely overblown, but the error was completely unforced and some of the justifications were nonsense. It was a legitimate story, albeit at nowhere near the level of coverage it got.

tsam

I’m not quite getting how the fucking hell a cabinet secretary doesn’t hit the job with an email account and a secure device and a server controlled by government information services…? This extends to the White House, where information is currently stored on RNC servers, which is totally fine. I mean, there’s no way they can hide information that way.

To me, this is all adding up to a seriously dangerous level on information security that goes far beyond a private mail server or a political party having control of hardware that stores information that belongs to the public.

Scott Lemieux

I have absolutely no patience with this shit. It was trivial. Nobody would have cared if anyone else did it. The idea that there’s ONE MAGIC TRICK Hillary Clinton could have used to not have bullshit non-scandals manufactured against her is insane. Stop hitting yourself.

nemdam

Amen.

This is the only proper response to EMAILS! Anyone who thinks the lesson from this is to nominate a candidate who has never made a mistake as trivial as EMAILS! is basically advocating to never nominate someone for president.

Stag Party Palin

but having her own email server was a stupid thing to do.

No. The Mighty Wurlitzer does not care what the issue is, it merely roars. Just being alive is enough to get it going. And by analogy, you’re telling me that Kerry was stupid for getting a medal in Vietnam because the Rethuglicans pilloried him for it. You are victim blaming and it would be great if you would just STFU.

nemdam

And it was stupid for Al Gore to be someone no one wants to have a beer with and care about the environment.

efgoldman

what could the guy possibly be indicted for? He set up an e-mail server at the behest of his boss?

It’s almost as if they think they can take all the energy gunning for an investigation into their guy, and divert it against the other side without losing any of the momentum or enthusiasm associated with it, and without any blowback, and that will dissipate it without harm to themselves.

tsam

Charge this guy with fucking what??

Crusty

Proximity to Hillary Clinton?

wjts

“Book ’em, Lou. One count of being a bear and one count of being an accessory to being a bear.”

BigHank53

If they can be patient enough to wait until Pence’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act gets signed, they’ll probably be able to charge him with aiding and abetting witchcraft.

rea

They want him charged with Contempt of Congress, for failing to answer all their questions or respond to their subpoenas.

tsam

Was this the one that supposedly invoked the 5A? If so, would he not be shielded from contempt or non-compliance related to the congressional hearing?

Crusty

Does a grand jury charge someone with contempt of congress, or does congress?

Gary K

Are you trolling us with the citation of Justice Harlan? Surely you know he didn’t invent that phrase from Matthew 23:24.

Bitter Scribe

I can only assume that this is their way of maintaining that the whole e-mail thing wasn’t a cynical, nonsensical campaign slur.

I’m kind of thinking they’re looking for a trophy to put hang on the wall and point to when Trump is asked about locking Hillary up. It all looks even worse for Hillary since the narrative would indicate that she let an underling go down for her crimes.

scott_theotherone

If I found a genie in a lamp, one of my wishes would be that the grand jury would instead indict Chaffetz for obstruction of justice.

efgoldman

If I found a genie in a lamp, one of my wishes would be that the grand jury would instead indict Chaffetz for obstruction of justice.